


before all we heard was silence

by plinys



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Basically Bad/Dark Shit (TM), Episode: s02e16 Doomworld, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Unhealthy Relationships, dark themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 17:35:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10496115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: Sometimes he remembers his own mind, put together all wrong but the Time Master’s hands.Minds are easy to change and Len -Len is different.(OR: Mick spends a year in Doomworld.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> i tried to write a fic where i fixed the coldwave from last nights episode and made it less painful and awful, but i think i actually made it worse

 

There’s a moment there, when they’re holding the Spear of Destiny in five different hands, and the voices come for Mick.

His parents - reminding him not to play with the fire.

Len - desperate and teenaged and joking about running away to a place that can’t hurt them.

His old parole officer - telling him that it wasn’t too late to turn his life around.

The Legends - asking him to choose them over the only person who ever tried to love him. 

And then silence. 

He remembers the silence months later.

  
  
  


One second they’re in the Vanishing Point, and in the next instant -

Warmth. 

A fireplace burning at the foot of a bed with too plush sheets.

Priceless art hanging on the walls.

Windows showing a city spread out before him. 

It’s Central City. 

Mick knows that, he would know this city from every angle, from every footpath, every street, even though it was never really his city.

That title belongs to Keystone.

But this was Len’s city. 

If Len was going to reshape the world, put things back together, this is where they would be together once more. He always came back to Central City.

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” there’s the familiar drawl. In the reflection of the glass, Mick catches sight of Len standing a few steps behind him. He’s got that look on his face, the one he gets after a particularly good heist.

Pleased with himself. 

For a second he is struck once more by the fact that Len is here. Real. Alive. That this isn’t a dream, it isn’t a hallucination, or a side effect of everything the Time Master’s put him through. 

This is real.

He could turn around. 

He could reach out and touch Len if he wanted to.

He could run his hands over every inch of him like they used to when they were desperate to remember that they were alive.

He could push Len back onto that bed with it’s too plush sheets and take him apart inch by inch until he turns back into the Len that Mick fell in love with.

He does none of that. 

He just continues staring out the window, leaving the question unanswered long enough that he can watch the pleased look on Len’s face fade back into that dark thing that had greeted him on the battlefield. 

It’s only then that he says, slow and steady, “Yeah, Boss.”

  
  
  


Mick’s used to being underestimated.

That was how they always worked best.

Len was the brains, the strategist. 

Maybe Mick wasn’t the smartest person around - big words got jumbled together in his head more often than not, he had a tendency to ditch the plans for what felt right in the moment, and everyone knew that he’d never gotten around to finishing school.

He was the muscle. 

Always had been. Always would be. 

People saw Mick Rory and knew what to expect when he showed up, somebody was going to get punched and lit on fire if they didn’t keep their mouths shut. Consistency played out well for a man like him. 

He pushed it further around the badges, acting a little more unhinged than necessary, because it fit into the plan.

Len’s plan.

Len always had a plan.

He also always told Mick what that plan was. 

Until now - 

“It’s better if you stay here,” Len says, he’s pulling a dark turtleneck on, and for a second Mick can see bruises along the sides of his arms that he didn’t put there, but he doesn’t ask. Len wouldn’t give him a straight answer anymore, not about everything, not about anything. He’s dismissive at his best, aggressive at his worst.  “This is a bit above your level. delicate stuff.” 

Mick’s used to being underestimated.

To being written off as the dumb one, only good when there’s a fight.

But not by Len.  

  
  


He tries to figure out exactly when the Legion of Doom took Len from.

Once he’d gone as far as to ask Thawne, but the speedster had just given him this condescending smile -

And then new  _ ruined  _ version of Jax had come in with some sort of report and Mick had lost any train of thought he might have had. Standing quickly with excuses to leave to avoid the eyes of Not-Jax following him with condescension and apprehension. 

Only when he’s free of the speedster and his former friends gaze does the thought come back to Mick.

Clearly this Len came from a time before the Oculus explosion.

Before they joined the Legends.

Before he and the Flash brokered their peace deal. 

Maybe even before he came to Mick with a gun that set things on fire and a disguised apology.

Mick can’t tell.

Sometimes he remembered how they’d found Rip, plucked out of the very same timeline that they’d been in, but different, his mind messed up by Thawne’s meddling. 

Sometimes he remembers his own mind, put together all wrong but the Time Master’s hands.

Minds are easy to change and Len -

Len is different. 

Mick just can’t figure out  _ how  _ different. 

So he watches Len.

Watches Len as he sits in the penthouse’s kitchen, studying blueprints for buildings Mick doesn’t even know the details of. He’d asked. Of course he’d asked. But there it had been again, the dismissive tone, the suggestion that Mick go make them dinner instead of worrying over this.

“Since when did I become your fucking housewife?”

That gets Len’s attention.

His head jerking up the blueprints to shoot Mick a look that’s just a bit surprised and soft and for a second he looks like the Len that Mick has been missing. 

“We’d actually have to  _ fuck _ occasionally for you to be my housewife,” Len drawls. He’s using his  _ Captain Cold  _ voice, the put upon act of a supervillain, rather than the man that Mick has known since they were just boys, since they were young and in love. 

It stings, sharp and sudden. 

He feels sick. 

It must show on his face. 

For a second later, Len speaks up again, still with the tone, but softer somehow just barely. “It was a joke, Mick.”

He shrugs and takes a drink of his beer. 

This whole damn world is a joke. 

  
  
  


Len isn’t the only one that’s wrong. 

“Come on, Mickey! It’ll be fun, and Lenny won’t mind if I steal you away for a few hours!”

She looks the same, in theory. Though she’s dressed in nicer clothes, has traded the leather jackets for thousand dollar dresses now that he brother owns the city. It’s gold fabric, shining and shimmering in the light, and if Mick didn’t know better he would assume it really was made of gold.

Actually it might be-

“You can’t just stay here forever! We haven’t hung out in months!”

Months.

It’s been months since they came here to this to this new reality. Time passing slower inevitably with each moment, dragging by in a way that  _ time  _ never has for him. 

“I missed you.”

It’s that does it, because Lisa may not be his sister not by blood, but they were family. Even before he and Len had taken a weekend trip to Boston and made it official. 

He’s missed her. 

He  _ misses _ her.

The Lisa they left behind in 2016. 

The Lisa he found in months later, who cried against his chest for hours when he’d told her Len had died. 

Not this Lisa.

This Lisa was different, she was wrong. 

She didn’t remember like Mick did, and what she did  _ remember  _ wasn’t right. Len had tried to fix his sister into an ideal image of what he had always wanted for her: a happy life, a wonderful childhood, one without any pain or hardship.

She’s happy in a pure way, a way that their Lisa had never been.  

But she was also clearly not their Lisa.

“I missed you too.” 

  
  
  


“What’s wrong?”

Len asks the question like he expects an easy answer.

Like Mick can just say what is on his mind and everything'll be okay, that they’ll be able to push whatever this is behind them. 

He can’t.

He can’t explain that nothing feels right here.

That sometimes he wishes he had given the Legends the spear. 

Not without being labeled a traitor. 

“I’m bored,” he says after a moment. 

As close to the truth as he can.

“Domesticity doesn’t suit us, does it,” Len says, his head is resting against Mick’s shoulder. It’s the closest they’ve gotten to what they used to have before they got here. He wonders what brought it on.

Mick would shrug, but it would jostle his shoulder, might push Len away and he doesn’t want to risk that. Unwilling to lose this brief moment of contact and closeness. 

His silence seems to be a good enough answer for Len. 

“You’d tell me if you were about to have one of your episodes, wouldn’t you,” Len says, sounding honestly concerned. “When’s the last time you’ve had a good fire?”

“I don’t know,” Mick says. 

He longer sure which question he’s answering. 

  
  
  


Len drives them out to the edge of the city. 

The city that  _ he  _ owns. 

The city that does what they tell it to. 

The city where the rules no longer apply. 

He takes him to an abandoned house, wooden boards covering the doors and windows. A place that will go up easily. 

There’s lighter fluid in the back seat of the car, only one reason that they’re here.

He doesn’t feel the need to burn anymore. Not sure in the Time Master’s tampered with his mind and removed anything that is undesirable to them. A fire’s nice but it doesn’t fuel anything inside of him anymore. It’s not an insatiable need. 

But Len doesn’t know that.

Not this Len. 

This Len has a familiar lighter between his fingers and a hopeful look on his face. 

Mick remembers this lighter, it was one of the first one that Len had stolen for him, back when they’d been fresh out of juvie. Len had pickpocketed some office worker, pressing the silver lighter back into his hands the second he’d gotten back to the place they were squatting in. 

He had lost it a few years later, left it behind when they were switching to a new place, and had forgotten all about it.

Of all the things for Len to bring back with the spear... 

It’s sentimental. 

It’s the Len he’s missed and -

Fuck it’s taken long enough. 

He kisses Len. There standing in front of the house they’re about to burn. Soft at first and then desperate when Len starts responding in kind,  _ this  _ at least is familiar. They know each other’s bodies more intimately than anyone else ever could. 

He’s shaking when they pull apart, damn near crying too, because he thought -

He’d thought that they’d never have this again.

Len had died, and when he came back he wasn’t quite himself.

Mick couldn’t bring himself to cross the space between them, even though there was a bed in his room which had clearly been meant for two. 

“Mick,” he says, his voice shaking. Breaking. Desperate. 

Kissing Len again becomes the only thing that matters in the whole universe. 

He kisses Len instead of dwelling on the monster inside of his head. 

  
  
  


They’re in Star City for a meeting with Darhk, or Len is.

Mick is here because Len can’t stand to have him too far away, because now that they’re together again (now that they’re  _ fucking  _ again), Len is as desperate for him as he was after Mick’s first solo stint in Iron Heights. 

Len kisses him quick and fierce, before going in to meet with Darhk, promising to be quick. 

Mick is left in a foyer, with only the shadow of what used to be Sara to keep him company. 

He tries not to focus on what she’s wearing, a slip of a nightgown, and a seductive smirk, because the implication of that is too much for him to handle at the moment.. 

(He won’t ask Len about it, even though he wants to. Because if he does get an answer he won’t like it. He feels like a coward. For all the times Sara had been a bit of a bitch, she didn’t deserve this.)

“My boss never let me go in either when it’s  _ business _ ,” she says, in that pouty tone that he’s already hating. Spreading her body out over one of the red couches in a way that was clearly supposed to have been seductive. 

Like she’s a second away from suggesting a way that the two of them could  _ pass the time _ until their _ bosses _ are done.  

He looks away from her before speaking.

“We’re partners,” Mick says. 

Because he and and Not-Sara had very different definition of the word  _ boss _ .

She smirks at him like she knows what he’s thinking.

“Okay, Big Boy, whatever helps you sleep at night.” 

  
  
  


“Do you ever regret this?”

“What’s there to regret,” Len asks. 

Everything.

Everything but you. 

He burns an apartment building on Cicero the next day, a building that he remembers from before, an apartment that they had lived in together.

It feels like catharsis.

The feeling is still there when he comes back to the penthouse Len made for them.

Len’s takes in the sight of him, the soot upon his brow, the smoke that clings to his clothing and seems to breathe a sigh of relief. Relaxing into the space around them. When he kisses Mick its soft and pleased. 

He looks pleased. 

“Good,” he says. Like Mick is a dog who had sat when told to do so. “You needed that.” 

  
  
  


When he needs a break away from this new world, he doesn’t look to the flames which had brought him comfort throughout most of his life. 

Instead it is the city -  _ Len _ ’s city - that Mick stares out at, from the windows in his bedroom.

From this high up he can see for miles, the city lights show hints of brightness in the dark. 

He’s got a sheet tied around his waist, nothing more, and if he focuses on the reflection in the glass, he can see Len laying in their bed behind him. Bright red blankets stand out against his skin, a sated and tired look on his face.

One that Mick put there.

He watches as Len starts to speak, braces in anticipation at the words. “Isn’t this the greatest thing that has ever happened to us?”

No.

It’s not.

It might be the very worse.

Well - second worst.

The worst was Len dying, leaving him behind with nothing but a ring in his pocket and a sense of duty to remain with a team that didn’t want him on their best days. 

But this was a close second. 

He just wished it hadn’t taken him so long to realize it.

To realize that no matter how many times they played house. No matter how many times tossed between the sheets. No matter how many times they acted like kings of their world. 

It wasn’t enough. 

He’d called it boredom, but it was more than that. 

He’d give anything to go back to Central City -  _ their  _ Central City - the one with the safehouse on 49th, a box of arrest records with his name on it, and a Lisa that smiles even while broken inside. 

The one with his Len, laying on the couch in the workshop, flipping through some book Mick won’t pay attention to - insisting that they should go along with this time travel mission and rob the world of it’s greatest treasures before they have time to become treasures. 

If he could hold the spear in his hands once more, he would take this whole world apart, put things back to the way they were. 

On that night Rip Hunter offered them a chance to be  _ Legends _ : He’d say no.

“Let’s rob a bank in the morning,” Len calls to him from the bed in a drowsy voice. Already moved onto the next topic, not bothered by Mick’s silence anymore.  “It’ll be like old times.”

“Yeah, Boss.” 


End file.
